Francesca is the Founder of the Academy of Intuition Medicine – perhaps the world’s foremost teaching institution of intuition. Francesca was not only interviewed in the film, she also assisted me greatly behind the scenes in connecting me with other key intuition practitioners.

Francesca was recently interviewed for a new book – Developing Informed Intuition for Decision Making, edited by Jay Leibowitz. Here is an excerpt from that book, featuring Francesca. It’s all about hunches!

Introduction

The idea of intuition is increasingly used in discussions about business management and decision-making, sometimes as if it were a new concept. But it is hardly so. A manager in the days before the Internet had little choice but to use intuition-the raw data simply was not accessible. Often, “a hunch” was all there was. Today, so much data is available that the inverse is true-in mere seconds, we can sum­mon enough data to support any decision we want to make-good or bad. Sorting through this flood of data makes the use of intuition more crucial than ever. Are we back to the idea of a hunch?

What is a hunch? Where does it come from, and how can we tell if a hunch is coming from intuition or false beliefs? Let’s ask an expert.

For the past 40 years, Francesca McCartney, PhD, has been researching and teaching the use of intuition in daily life and as a modality for medical healing. She has published several books, is a featured lecturer on the topic of intuition, and is the founder of three schools: the Academy of Intuition Medicine® founded in 1984; Energy Medicine University, founded 2006; and the Academy of Intuition Medicine® Online, founded in 2017.

[Kirk Hurford] Dr. McCartney, I know this sounds simple, but to begin with, what is intuition?

[Francesca McCartney]

That was exactly the question I asked in 1976, and I am continuing to explore and expand upon that topic. Recent research shows that humans have more than 21 senses. Most people assume that we operate with only the five common senses. That belief was given to us by Aristotle and is long overdue for a revision. Those over the five senses are accessed via intuition.

The Oxford Dictionary defines intuition as “the faculty of knowing as if by instinct, without conscious reasoning.” But what does that mean? It is the sense of knowing or perceiving something without knowing exactly how you know. How does this work? Can we develop this ability in ourselves for decision-making and more? Yes!

Humans are wired from birth to receive inner- and outer-world information signals, but too often we ignore or don’t trust our subtle intuitive perceptions. The world is constantly communicating with us and the secret is learning to pay attention.

We are so much more than our five common senses, and learning to listen to, trust, and act upon your intuition develops super-consciousness, and with practice, becomes the normal way you live in your body and operate in the world.

We experience intuition in many perfectly ordinary, everyday ways. Intuition is the sudden “Aha!” that seemingly comes from nowhere after wracking your brain for an analytical solution that refuses to come-the light bulb over your head. Intuition is the flash of insight that reveals where your lost keys are. Intuition is the picture of someone in your head just before they call on the phone or walk into your office. Intuition is that feeling in your gut when something is not right, or someone is lying. Intuition is that inner knowing, so often drowned out by other, more insistent noises, that warns or advises us, and to which we often say (after the fact), “If only I had listened …”

[KH] Listened to what?

[FM] Intuition has location signal points within your body. Intuition is a learned language of interpreting those signals-just as a child learns how to decipher signal language from sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste. Each of the five com­mon senses has a receptor location that delivers signals to the nervous system and the brain for decoding and informing. The language of intuition operates in the same way.

In business, and in life, operating with a wide perspective of information yields the best outcome in the decision-making process. Five points of perception is a lim­ited range of information and often is filtered through bias from conditioned data entry. An excellent starting place to stimulate stronger intuitive language signals is to listen to your first hit, go with your hunch, trust your gut feeling. The more you listen, trust, and follow through with your hits and hunches the stronger the sig­nal wiring in the nervous system becomes, whereupon your decisions are memory imprinted in your brain, which develops a cognitive intuitive language.

[KH]

When we say cognitive bias, we’re referring to a personal perspective, right? How is this different from intuition?

[FM]

Cognitive bias is a language of personal perspective that for the five-sense person is developed from a limited perspective of the five senses. Western-minded people lean toward using analysis and rote educational sources for deductive decision-making. This system of analytical decision-making does not recognize the larger menu of possible choices available with the expanded human sense of intuition, and therein is a limited decision-making process. Decisions made in a box rather than inspirational choices streaming from outside of the box-where intuition, inspira­tion, and invention operate.

Limited perception developed as a survival mechanism as our body is bom­barded by two million bits of information every minute. The common senses and analytical mind act as a filter. If we were unable to filter out most of these bits, we would go mad in one second. We use our filters-the purpose of which was to weed out information irrelevant to our species-for the task: to lock into those objectifi­cations alone which are in tune with cultural, informational, and survival purposes.

To survive with a semblance of sanity, we need some sort of filters to pick out those events, interactions, or relationships that we want or need to focus on. This doesn’t mean that we should always keep filters in place or use them for purposes other than they were originally intended. Filters require intentional management. If properly handled, filters can both isolate the objects that we need to focus on and reveal their relationship with other objects and the whole. They can be both-like two sides of a coin.

Intuitively sourced information does not pass through the same perceptual fil­ters that process analytical information. The sense of sight, for example, gathers five points of data through the rods and cones in the eyes, travels through a decoding filter in the optic nerve that chooses three of the five data points based on the most common memory-that is the memory pattern that has the most charge stored in the brain and delivers a composite image to the brain built on that three of five choice of repeated experience.

This creates visual image perception based on repeated data and most likely probabilities and excludes new data/new perception as a primary choice for decision-making. These filters become so internalized and automated that alternative perspectives, such as intuitive sensing, are not even rec­ognized. This mostly unconscious control mechanism obstructs the ability to think outside of the box, thus limiting new knowledge, inspiration, and the “quick hit.”

Historical and cultural contexts also influence perception and create bias. A Coke bottle dropped from an airplane into a society of bushmen in South Africa’s Kalahari Desert in the movie The Gods Must Be Crazy is seen as many things, but never as a container for carbonated beverages. It has been reported that some pre-Columbian Native Americans could not see the large sailing vessels of the first European explorers to approach their shores because they had no cultural prec­edent for such an event or object, and no appropriate words in their vocabulary to describe it. Thus, in their reality, such things simply did not exist. Even the “objec­tive” cognitive act of seeing in the material world requires a synergy of senses.

Genius is often described as highly creative, clever, and brilliant-characteris­tics of a person who has access to knowledge and data beyond the norm-which is a definition that also applies to intuition.

[KH]

So, you’re saying intuitive information is from outside the box, and cognitive bias is an attempt to restrict information from inside the box?

[FM]

In the broadest sense, yes. Information is more than just facts. Facts also have context. Context is a powerful influence on how we perceive facts. Context is what gives facts meaning. For example, you might be reading a story about animals on a farm and, at some point in events, you realize that there is a bigger story being told (Orwell, 1945). As the context changes, so does your perception of the facts. The pig is no longer a pig. Intuition allows for a richer context. Cognitive bias comes from a failure to perceive and appreciate the contextual information that comes from our extra-normal senses.

I did a Facebook Live video the other day on the concept of “Hope Bridges,” and thought I’d do a blog too, for those that never saw the video.

A Hope Bridge is someone who provides a bridge of hope from one part of your life to another.

To give you an example: during the making of my movie: PGS – Intuition is your Personal Guidance System – at critical points in the production when I needed finance to keep shooting, various people at various times stepped forward and offered me funding.

Sometimes these offers were considerable – in a few instances I was offered big bucks to complete the film. Sometimes I was left dangling for years – literally years. But for one reason or another, these offers never materialised.

Often, fear kicked in.

That’s ok – because I later realised that these people served an important function – with their promises of help they bridged me over a period where, had they not made that offer, I might have given up in despair.

They provided me a bridge of hope during a vulnerable period.

It’s easy to consider these people as giant time-wasters, energy-wasters, to look at them disparagingly and call them flakes, or worse – and there were occasions where we ourselves invested money, as well as time, in traveling to meet with them, take them out to dinner, or pick up the tab at lunch – not to mention the emotional investment involved.

And later, you discover their promises are worthless.

Now I realise that wasn’t their purpose – that’s not why they came into my life. They came into my life to give me hope – sustained hope until such time as someone else presented that did step forward and enable the film to continue.

So these people, who in another life I would have called nasty names, in this life I say Thank You! – for being a hope bridge, and for allowing me to gracefully transition across an abyss of worry and despair, so that I land on the other side, my hope fully realised.

Like this:

In starting off a blog with the title ‘I’m not special,’ it kind of implies that actually I am special, and I know I’m special, and anyone who knows me must also know that I’m special, because bloody hell isn’t it obvious?

I mean, crikey – you’d have to be a total dumb arse if you knew me and weren’t in awe of how special I was.

And in writing a blog titled I’m not special I’m actually pretending to be humble, and that, in a perverse kind of way, makes me even more special.

Does that make sense?

Nah – it doesn’t make much sense to me either.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m not special, because we all are special, and that makes none of us special.

I’ve made a movie on intuition, and now I’ve written a book about it too – but that doesn’t make me special. It makes me curious. It just so happens that over the past forty years I’ve developed certain skills that have enabled me to turn that curiosity into films and books.

I heard a voice early one morning, while driving. It told me to slow down as I was approaching an intersection. A truck ran a red light and nearly killed me.

That voice saved my life.

I was curious about that voice – so I made a movie about my search to find out what it was.

And what I discovered was that what happened to me wasn’t so special – many many people have had similar experiences. Most of them just don’t want to talk about it – and none have made a film about it.

Paul Allen died the other day. Paul Allen was the co-founder of Microsoft, along with Bill Gates.

Paul Allen was 65 – same age as me. He used his years on this planet in ways different to me. And to you.

Does that make him special? More special than me, or you?

We are all special.

None of us are more or less special than anyone else. We are all part of divine energy and it’s this divine energy that’s special.

If you want to read my book of the film PGS – Intuition is your Personal Guidance System – here is a link to its Amazon site.

The book goes even deeper than the film into the mechanics of intuition, and details how you can use your intuition every day to make better choices, to enrich your life in ways you never thought possible.

Over the past year, the film has been playing to sell-out screenings across the US, and Australia. The film has been called a “life-changer,” and Caroline Myss described it as “truly superb.”

The film finally goes on sale online on November 1st!

Thanks to James Terry of Arcadia Press for publishing the book!

By the way, for those of you in Australia, because Amazon still hasn’t worked out its GST issue with our country, the paperback won’t be available for another month or so. If you want one, email me on billbennett.pgs@gmail.com, and I’ll post you a copy. Cost is AU$25 + postage.

With the opening of my film now in the US to sell-out screenings, I’ve been doing Q&As after the movie, but also lots of media interviews. And I thought I would share with you some of the more interesting questions I’ve been asked, and how I’ve responded.

INTERVIEWER: Are intuition and common sense the same thing?

MY RESPONSE: Actually, they are the opposite thing. Common-sense comes from the rational self, not the intuitive self, and it’s based on past experience, logic, and often times tried and true accepted beliefs. Intuition isn’t based on past experience – it works outside of time and space, and it doesn’t draw from logic or the intellect. Common sense works to keep you safe, keep you contained, it has you doing what you’ve done in the past, or what others have done in the past. It’s limited to what’s gone before. Intuition is limitless. It asks that you follow paths you’ve never followed before. It leads to true discovery, to originality, to adventure. Common sense contracts you. Intuition expands you.

INTERVIEWER: Can intuition be used to harm someone, or can it harm yourself?

MY RESPONSE: Intuition can never be harmful, to you or to others. It comes from Source, from Spirit, and it can’t be used for anything other than love. It can’t be corrupted or manipulated into any kind of injurious act. If someone gets “messages” that ask you to harm someone else, or even think harmful thoughts, then that’s not intuition. It’s an aspect of your being that it rooted in the “I,” or the ego. Intuition exists outside of ego, and only ever works in the Light.

INTERVIEWER: How do you know that the “voice” that you hear is your intuition, and not just some random thought/voice that you’ve made up yourself?

MY RESPONSE: Intuition leaves you with no doubt. It is immediate, and it’s messaging is unambiguous. And it’s accompanied by a sense of calm, and knowing. Your ego-voice leaves you in doubt, in confusion, and it’s often wrapped in fear. Your intuition voice is the antithesis of fear. The purpose of fear is to create more fear, as Paul Selig’s Guides say. The purpose of intuition is to keep you healthy and safe, so that you can fulfil your true purpose in life.

INTERVIEWER: Isn’t intuition just another word for instinct?

MY RESPONSE: No, they are totally different. The two words are not interchangeable. Instinct is primitive, it’s animalistic, it’s a survival mechanism that is body based. It’s a function of the body. Intuition is timeless, limitless, it’s a divine messaging service and it’s a function of the soul.

INTERVIEWER: In your film you never talk about meditation as being a way to access your intuition. Why not?

MY RESPONSE: Because I didn’t want to scare people off. You don’t need to meditate to access your intuition. You can access your intuition standing in the shower or having a bath, or walking along a beach or swimming, or hiking in the woods. You don’t need to sit crossed legged in a cave for hours chanting Om and clutching a crystal to become intuitive. The concept of meditation is terrifying for many people – particularly men – and I want the film to encourage men to become more intuitive.

These are just some of the questions I get asked. I don’t set myself up as an expert on this stuff by any means, but after 18 years reading and researching and trying to figure out what that voice was that saved my life, I have come to certain conclusions that make sense to me. And my job, as I see it, is to communicate that as wide as possible.

His Holiness Pujya Swamiji Chidanand Saraswati, head of the Parmarth Niketan Ashram at Rishikesh, saw the film this past week and said: “It is beautiful. It will help a lot of people. And it will heal a lot of people too.”

Sadhviji Bhagawati Saraswati – also from Parmarth – extended the invitation after watching the film, and said it would screen on the banks of the Ganges in a pavilion right by where they do their famous nightly Aarti ceremony.

The festival is a major event on the international yoga calendar and attracts more than two thousand people from all over the world. It runs from March 1-7, and includes key note addresses from Saints, Yoga Masters, and some of the world’s leading practitioners and teachers of yoga.

I’m delighted to announce that Gathr Films has come on board to release my film PGS – Intuition is your Personal Guidance System in the US.

Whilst in Los Angeles last week, Jennifer and I met with the President of Gathr, Jake Craven. He saw the film, loved it, and now they’ll be releasing it theatrically, on demand, throughout the United States and its territories.

I’ve chosen to release the film via Cinema on Demand because I believe it’s the best way to get the film out to its audience – and to give the investors the best possibility of making some money out of it!

The beauty of Cinema on Demand is that the rights aren’t cross-collateralised. In other words, profits made from one type of release aren’t “crossed” against losses from another. Having now made 16 feature films as a producer and director, I’ve seen how the Hollywood “creative accounting” system works – and believe me, it doesn’t work in favour of producers or investors!

Going Cinema on Demand, we get to release the film theatrically to an audience that wants to see it – that demands to see it! – and we get to keep the Video on Demand rights for our 444 release at 4:44pm on 4/4 – being April 4th 2018. We also keep all other rights, such as various TV rights.

We are in the early stages of locking in Cinema on Demand for Australia and New Zealand, and possibly UK and some other territories as well. I’ll let you know when those deals are done.

We are also bringing on board a team of publicists out of New York, and a couple of social media mavens – one out of Prague, the other out of India – to begin rolling out a global social media campaign, to be coordinated by our Impact Producer, Kerrin McNeil.

As for when the film will begin its Cinema on Demand run in the US – well, we’ll be figuring that out in the next little while, but most probably some time in January 2018.

Jennifer and I are thrilled to be working with the team at Gathr. They are good people, they love the film and see a big audience for it in the US, and we’re excited at what the future holds for this groundbreaking film on intuition.